Are we all becoming hermits now?

Long before Covid, wi-fi and Deliveroo, Badger in The Wind in the Willows showed us how to live beyond the manifold fatuities of this gimcrack world. Cosily tucked into his burrow with a roaring fire and well-stocked cellar, he was unbothered by importunate weasels and other denizens of the Wild Wood. He padded his underground realm for six months a year in dressing gown and down-at-heel slippers not just because he was a hibernating animal but out of existential temperament.

‘Badger hates Society,’ explained Rat. But, really, don’t we all? Not for him the ‘Poop! Poop!’ of Mr Toad, always going places and doing stuff. More Badger’s style was the greater wisdom imbibed unconsciously from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: ‘Man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room.’

This adorable mustelid was neither the spiritual outlier of all those American preppers holing up in their bunkers to wait out the apocalypse, nor the heir of world-renouncing monks and nuns of yesteryear, but symptomatic of a disorder that pre-dates Covid. Indeed this virus of sociophobic hermeticism is infinitely more virulent; but its spread may well have been hastened by the pandemic. So the French writer Pascal Bruckner suggests in this jolly romp through the socio-philosophical consequences of the recent rise in sales of onesies, slankets and badger-themed slippers. The problem may even be incurable. Bruckner cites the example of Japanese teenagers, hikikomoris, who are glued to their screens day and night, with food on trays left outside their doors.  

‘A new anthropological type is emerging,’ he moans: ‘the shrivelled, hyperconnected being who no longer needs others or the outside world.’ To be sure, this type is very different from Badger who, for all that he hated Society, was a public-spirited chap, quite prepared to entertain visitors lavishly and strut from his burrow to cudgel the weasels who squatted in Toad Hall.